Lightcone Infrastructure is looking for funding and are working on the following projects:
- We run LessWrong, the AI Alignment Forum, and have written a lot of the code behind the Effective Altruism Forum.
- During 2022 and early 2023 we ran the Lightcone Offices, and are now building out a campus at the Rose Garden Inn in Berkeley, where we've been doing repairs and renovations for the past few months.
- We've also been substantially involved in the Survival and Flourishing Fund's S-Process (having written the app that runs the process) and are now running Lightspeed Grants.
- We also pursue a wide range of other smaller projects in the space of "community infrastructure" and "community crisis management". This includes running events, investigating harm caused by community institutions and actors, supporting programs like SERI MATS, and maintaining various small pieces of software infrastructure.
If you are interested in funding us, please shoot me an email at habryka@lesswrong.com (or if you want to give smaller amounts, you can donate directly via PayPal here).
Funding is quite tight since the collapse of FTX, and I do think we work on projects that have a decent chance of reducing existential risk and generally making humanity's future go a lot better, though this kind of stuff sure is hard to tell. We are looking to raise around $3M to $6M for our operations in the next 12 months.[1]
Also feel free to ask any questions in the comments.
- ^
Two draft readers of this post expressed confusion that Lightcone needs money, given that we just announced a funding process that is promising to give away $5M in the next two months. The answer to that is that we do not own the money moved via Lightspeed Grants and are only providing grant recommendations to Jaan Tallinn and other funders.
We do separately apply for funding from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, through which Jaan has been our second biggest funder. We also continue to actively fundraise from both SFF and Open Philanthropy (our largest funder).
Thanks for this detailed response; I found it quite helpful. I maintain my "yeah, they should probably get as much funding as they want" stance. I'm especially glad to see that Lightcone might be interested in helping people stay sane/grounded as many people charge into the policy space.
This seems quite reasonable to me. I think it might've been useful to include something short in the original post that made this clear. I know you said "also feel free to ask any questions in the comments"; in an ideal world, this would probably be enough, but I'm guessing this isn't enough given power/status dynamics.
For example, if ARC Evals released a post like this, I expect many people would experience friction that prevented them from asking (or even generating) questions that might (a) make ARC Evals look bad, (b) make the commenter seem dumb, or (c) potentially worsen the relationship between the commenter and ARC evals.
To Lightcone's credit, I think Lightcone has maintained a (stronger) reputation of being fairly open to objections (and not penalizing people for asking "dumb questions" or something like that), but the Desire Not to Upset High-status People or Desire Not to Look Dumb In Front of Your Peers By Asking Things You're Already Supposed to Know are strong.
I'm guessing that part of why I felt comfortable asking (and even going past the "yay, I like Lightcone and therefore I support this post" to the mental motion of "wait, am I actually satisfied with this post? What questions do I have") is that I've had a chance to interact in-person with the Lightcone team on many occasions, so I felt considerably less psychological friction than most.
All things considered, perhaps an ideal version of the post would've said something short like "we understand we haven't given any details about what we're actually planning to do or how we'd use the funding. This is because Oli finds this stressful. But we actually really want you to ask questions, even "dumb questions", in the comments."
(To be clear I don't think the lack of doing this was particularly harmful, and I think your comment definitely addresses this. I'm nit-picking because I think it's an interesting microcosm of broader status/power dynamics that get in the way of discourse, and because I expect the Lightcone team to be unusually interested in this kind of thing.)